Angles of Refraction

[ase]

I am too old to waste a Saturday surfing 40 or 50 years of Marvel comics history, but that's exactly what I did today. Escapism much?

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, if you're fantasy-casting Marvel comics adaptations, who does Ewan McGregor play? I have just enough shame and attention to detail that I'm not going to insta-cast him for Captain America (why yes, this is an obvious ploy involving Robert Downey Jr), but I am giving it way too much thought. I mean, there's umpty-thousand other Avengers, hangers-on, X-Men & etc to choose from. Other than Nick Fury, who is - forgive me - motherf*cking cast; and besides, norabomay pointed out that Aaron Eckhart actually looks the part.

I liked last weekend's three-day break from the lab so much that I put in for vacation time and am doing it again this weekend. So far I've been to a WSFA meeting, baked chocolate chip cookies, and admired TS Hannah's rain and wind, and declared it Navel-Gazing Emo Weekend Of Goal-Setting. I've done almost nothing but stick money into my (in case of emergency, break glass) savings account this year, and it's made me absolutely miserable. I've done one five-day trip since I started my "new" job in February. I had a frivolous night on the town in August. It's time for the quarterly reassessment: what do I want to do, professionally and personally?

Professional is fairly straightforward: I have a field I like (bio), I have some tools to work with (degree, lab experience), there's some logical tracks from here (PhD, PhD + MBA, M.Sci + MBA, med school; work for 10 years, pick up an M. Sci somewhere in there, and be middle management). There's a couple of jokers in the deck - I can always run away and try to do something with a camera! - but they're unlikely to play a big role in employment or income for at least the next five years. I'm an idiot for not trying to fit in an academic class this semester, but it would've been differently dumb to impulsively cram a random evening course in, instead of deferring the option until spring semester.

Personal is less clear. Someone posted on wurds: "Civilization can be reduced to the following: 'I need a hug. Go away.' Unable to solve this conundrum, and having nothing better to do in the meantime, we build cathedrals and drink heavily." Life is a series of compromises between the push and pull of human interaction, with a lot of displacement into elaborate distractions, useful or destructive. My parents continue to prove themselves as excellent models of compromise with an imperfect world, but I think there are better compromises to make than those I saw assumed until I went to college. Do I want to get married? Do I want kids? I don't want what I grew up with. So what do I see people doing that admire and want to emulate? Professional tracking is painless compared to the messy business of life off the clock.

Comments

[tessfawcett.livejournal.com]

Man, I'm right there with you on that last paragraph, and so is everyone else I know. We all just muddle along as best we can.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. We are all sort of lost together!

[(Anonymous)]

#hug#

[hourglasscreate.livejournal.com]

That last was me. #hug#

[ase.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

...Yeah. This is a hard one. I'll give a tentative plug for marriage. (Tentative because my 2.5-yr marriage does not give me the authority to speak on this. But when has that ever stopped me?) When both are invested in it, and are a good match to begin with (maybe, in your language, agreeing on what compromises are not acceptable, and which are so acceptable they are barely compromises), it's the most awesome thing in the world -- partially because the compromises are shared, and they build something together. Then again, that very quality probably is part of what makes divorces absolute hell, to see all that going for nothing. And people I know, my age, are starting to get divorced, and I can see that it would definitely be better not to get married if one had any doubts about being a good match or were not totally sure both you and your partner were invested in making it work. (I think kids compound both the satisfaction of building if the family works, and the horrendousness if it doesn't, but I'm really not qualified to speak on that.)

Now that I've rambled on (and on... sorry, you landed right in something I've been pondering a lot lately, because of my sister's upcoming wedding and the aforementioned divorces)... *hug*, and I'll shut up now.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Tentative because my 2.5-yr marriage does not give me the authority to speak on this. But when has that ever stopped me?

Ha! So true for so many of us. :-)

Now that I've rambled on (and on... sorry, you landed right in something I've been pondering a lot lately, because of my sister's upcoming wedding and the aforementioned divorces).

Hey, I'll take opinions and insight where I can get 'em. I'm not even at the maybe-marriage stage; I'm at the "if I start seriously trying to date I'll have to think about marriage and kids and eeek" stage, sigh. I'm too old to whine about how my parents subtly and completely gave me, like, an anti-desire to date, but that's the "saying mean things about your parents" rant, and as I was saying: the expiration date has passed. The post-parent-divorce realization that most relationships don't suck most of the time is still sinking in.

Tangenting back a bit - when I said my parents were excellent models of compromise, I was trying to say that they've individually made separate compromises. Also there was a fair amount of sarcasm designed to be invisible to anyone but me when I said they were "excellent models." Both of my parents have made some really idiotic decisions; acknowledging their character flaws (or, in some cases, acknowledging that somewhere in the mess were good intentions) and moving on is still sometimes frustrating. Okay, this turn into the All About Parents comment, but apparently that's where I'm at.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, parents. Mine have actually made some really smart and admirable decisions (especially considering my dad came from a seriously screwed-up family, and my mom... had to deal with my dad having come from it, but that's a whole other tangent we can get into some other time), but I definitely knew I didn't want their marriage or large chunks of their kid-raising style. (Though the academic and music stuff, I'm totally keeping.)

I could imagine (at least, this was kind of what I thought you meant) that your parents could be excellent (or not) models of individual compromise with the world, while still managing to maybe not be such great models of joint compromise with, oh, other people. Both are kind of important...

You're probably a little too mature to do the "date first, think about marriage later" which is how I immaturely approached life, once upon a time (and had at least one fairly near miss of what would have been a disastrous long-term relationship). On the other hand, dating relationships can be, if one lets them, good tests of whether you feel like you want to make those sorts of compromises... and if you don't want to, then at least you know. And it may be a small consolation that at least you don't fall into the opposite trap of "I need to get married... and here's a guy right here that I've been dating for a while, so!" without actually really thinking it through. That mindset accounts, I think, at least partially for the three divorces that happened in my circle recently, plus the narrow escape my sister had (if she had married her previous boyfriend, which she really wanted and was pressuring him to do, I wouldn't have given them even odds on staying together-- it was at the point where I was buying her books on "why marriages fail," I'm not kidding). I was susceptible to that as well (we grew up in a home and a religion where it was assumed you would get married and have kids), but I think I lucked out despite it.

In rambly conclusion... sort of... a lot of relationships suck, yeah. But they can really not suck. Really!